Rory MacLean is the author of more than a dozen books including Stalin's Nose, Under the Dragon and Geography of Heaven: Travels to the Hereafter. He has won awards from the Canada Council and the Arts Council of England as well as a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship, and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary prize. John le Carré called him 'surely the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time'. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the curator of the annual Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, he divides his time between the UK, Berlin and Sicily.

Author photograph by Susanne Ollmann